Most everyone feels guilty after a Thanksgiving holiday meal. With a little planning your meal can be healthy and happy.

Eat a small protein snack before going. With meals starting often times in mid-afternoon people are hungry. Make sure to eat something at your regular meal times so you aren’t starving when your meal arrives.

Fill up half your plate with green vegetables. This will help to fill you up and keep your intake of fatty food to a minimum.

Turkey is lower in calories so fill up on turkey.

Watch the gravy, gravy is high in fat. Use gravy sparingly.

Eat slowly. To eat slowly you need to make sure you aren’t hungry, going back to rule number 1.

One bad meal doesn’t spoil everything. One Thanksgiving meal is on average 3000 calories. This is the equivalent of less than one pound. Many people say in their head they they’ve blown their diet and keep eating poorly, and as a result they gain all the holiday pounds because they feel they have failed. Don’t let guilt keep you from eating well.

The health benefits of switching to a Mediterranean style diet and upping the amount of time spent exercising for a period of just eight weeks can still be seen a year after stopping the regime, a new study has shown. The research by Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Lincoln in the UK revealed that the diet and exercise combination leads to improved blood flow in cells in the inner lining of the blood vessels – called the endothelial cells – a full 12 months after completing participation in the intervention programme. Endothelial cells line the interior of the entire vascular system of the human body – from the large arteries to the smallest capillaries – and improvements in their function could reduce the risk of people developing cardiovascular disease, the study said.

Nothing drives sales like the promise of a new supplement to help lose weight. I have always said that the best way to lose weight is to eat right and exercise. However, some people still struggle with weight loss.

This article in Medical News Today, discusses research from Spain that shows pterostilbene reduces body fat. Now for the bad news the research was on rats. Which is good news if you have some fat rats at home you want to treat. It does not mean that pterostilbene will work as well for you.

Another question most people will ask is what is Pterostilbene? Pterostilbene is a phenol very similar to resveratrol. It is found in a wide variety of foods including wine, blueberries, peanuts, grapes and more.

This is promising research however, and once it talked about on Dr. Oz you can be guaranteed that it will all sell out overnight.

Junk isn’t just bad for your body but it also affects your ability to eat a balanced diet. While it is putting on excessive weight it changing your desires to eat a healthy and balanced diet. A junk food diet over times leads to overeating and obesity by changing self-control.

The researchers believe that a junk food diet damages the circuits for reward in parts of your brain and make it difficult to limit your intake of food. These foods become highly addictive.

However a second article from Medical Foods Today, discusses that we can re-educate our brains behavioral based weight loss to undo the damage caused by junk foods. In a 6 month period of time participant were able to change the way the reward centers in the brain responded to foods.

The participants needed to reverse their addiction to unhealthy food as well and increase their love for healthy foods.

For me I’ve found the making sure I eat only healthy foods and totally avoiding “junk food” is the best way for me to lose weight and stay healthy. I found that after 2 weeks on the raw food diet my taste buds changed and I found the idea of junk food unappealing.

But as you can see from above it is best to avoid junk foods as they do have long term effect in your health and behavior.

Self-control doesn’t come easily when it comes to eating junk food. While many of us typically blame ourselves for weak willpower, a new study this week indicates the food we eat may actually change our brain in a way that makes it harder for us to move on to other foods when we’ve had enough of the junk. Previous research has shown that many animals, including humans, have a built-in mechanism for balancing their food intake. When a person eats a lot of a certain type of food, their brain starts to decrease the appeal of the taste of that food. As this happens, a person tends to stop eating that food and moves on to something else, naturally balancing out their diet. But there are ways around this. Prior studies had indicated that eating a lot of rich, high-calorie foods could weaken this barrier in favor of the reward these tasty treats can provide, but no research had formally confirmed this hypothesis.

A new study shows what researchers have suspected for years—consuming carbohydrates dramatically increases the risk for a common type of breast cancer, a kind that is notoriously hard to treat, according to an article scheduled for publication in the Oct. Life Extension Magazine. The study, published earlier this year in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, revealed that postmenopausal women with previous breast cancer were two times more likely to have recurrence if their carbohydrate intake remained stable or increased after surgery. While the study focused on reducing future cancer recurrences, it has tremendous implications for women who have not yet experienced breast cancer, as well as for everyone concerned about preventing cancers in the future. “There is growing interest among the scientific community in the relationship between carbohydrate consumption and cancer, with a special focus on breast cancer,” says Michael A. Smith, M.D. and senior health scientist for Life Extension.

The research was conducted by investigators at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, who note that their study adds to increasing evidence that lifestyle factors could add to brain health later in life, perhaps even reducing risk of dementia. According to senior researcher Prof. James T. Becker, health professionals estimate that more than 80 million people will have dementia by 2040. And the Alzheimer’s Association note that 5.2 million Americans currently have Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most common types of dementia. By 2050, the organization estimates that the number of people aged 65 and older with Alzheimer’s disease could nearly triple to 16 million if some sort of medical breakthrough or intervention is not put in place to slow or stop the disease.

A new Tel Aviv University study, published in Diabetologia, suggests that the consumption of whey protein concentrate before breakfast may suppress post-meal glucose spikes in diabetics. According to TAU’s Prof. Daniela Jakubowicz and Dr. Julio Wainstein of the Wolfson Medical Center’s Diabetes Unit, Prof. Oren Froy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Bo Ahrén of Lund University in Sweden, the consumption of whey protein before meals may even keep diabetics’ need for insulin treatment at bay. Blood sugar surges, or after-meal glucose spikes, can be life threatening for the 29 million Americans with diabetes. Diabetic blood sugar spikes have been linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, kidney failure, and retinal damage.

Originally cultivated in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, chickpeas, also known as garbanzo beans, have spread their culinary influence to areas all over the world. They are featured prominently in Italian, Greek, Indian, Middle Eastern, Spanish and Portuguese cuisine. Though the most common type of chickpea appears round and beige, other varieties include colors such as black, green, and red. Like other legumes such as beans, peas and lentils, chickpeas are prized for their high protein and fiber content, and also contain several key vitamins and minerals known to benefit human health. This MNT Knowledge Center feature is part of a collection of articles on the health benefits of popular foods. It provides a nutritional breakdown of the chickpea and an in-depth look at its possible health benefits, how to incorporate more chickpeas into your diet and any potential health risks of consuming chickpea.

Dozens of supplement ingredients have been touted for weight loss, but which have the strongest evidence showing they work and, among those, which products are highest in quality? To answer these questions, ConsumerLab.com, the independent health and nutrition product evaluator, reviewed the clinical evidence for more than 20 ingredients and tested the quality of more than 50 products. ConsumerLab found that no supplement has a large weight-loss effect, but certain ingredients may have a modest, short-term effect equating to 1 to 3 pounds lost in a month. From a quality standpoint, however, more than one-third of products used for weight loss have failed to pass ConsumerLab.com’s testing, most often for containing less of an ingredient than claimed.